Tuesday, September 11, 2007

When I visited the Google Zurich offices in June, there was a bit of discussion about the Google Code Jam. We were told that since they had so many regional code jams last year, the organisers were exhausted to the point where they decided to take a break this year. Hence the talk was that there would be no code jams this year.

Today, however, I came across a blog post on the official Google blog. This post brings back hope that the Code Jam will return soon. Quite interesting was the following line:

now we're excited to join that community in our own right, by producing a Google Code Jam of our own!

In previous years they've made use of the TopCoder platform and the contest has therefore been very TopCoder-like. Hopefully this means that they will get more involved in running things themselves and therefore moving away from the TopCoder style, which I personally dislike due to the short duration. The second practice problem the post links has a Google theme, which further suggests they will be moving away from TopCoder.

I sure hope that it returns, although I would be far more impressed if they can put together a marathon contest lasting about 24-72 hours. With marathon contests you get to work in a team and rack your brains together for much longer and it can be great fun.